If
Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today he may well have attended
President Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony wearing a
black-and-white checkered kaffiyeh and holding a sign saying, “Mr.
President, stop the Gaza nightmare. No more false hopes and delayed
dreams. End the Occupation NOW!” Civil rights leaders spent precious
political capital to speak out against America’s wrongdoings across the
world, most notably the war in Vietnam. President Obama should spend
domestic political capital to denounce Israel’s domination of the
Palestinians. Nothing would boost desperately needed international
capitalmore.

Rev.
King would have recognized that without unfettered US arms, funds and
political cover, Israel would never have been able to inflict the level
of brutality it ‘proudly’ inflicted on Gaza. Nor would it have been
able to keep Palestinians in bondage so long.

King
would have pointed to where the solution to this conflict lies: the
United States of America. If President Obama is to be an historic
leader, and not just the first African American elected to the
presidency, he must not tolerate Israel’s continued slaps in the face,
from restricting President Carter’s movements in the Mideast, to using
US funds to build illegal Jewish-only settlements, to launching a
one-sided “war” on Palestinian civilians in Gaza. He will instead deal
with the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict.